When Is It Okay to Have a High Exit Rate?

Have you taken a look at your exit rate lately? It’s often confused with bounce rate, but while a high bounce rate is almost never a good thing, there are certain situations in which your exit rate will naturally be high.

What Is the Difference Between Exit Rate and Bounce Rate?

Exit rate measures the percentage of people who leave your site from any given page. The visitor may have clicked around extensively on your site, or he may have simply entered and left.

Bounce rate, on the other hand, measures the number of people who land on your site and exit without clicking. It’s a faster indicator of problems because it shows you which pages fail to engage your visitors.

What Pages Have a Naturally High Exit Rate?

Order Confirmation Pages—Order completion=mission accomplished. You can cheerfully wave good-bye while offering incentives for visitors to come again.

Blog Posts—Visitors who regularly follow your blog will often click through from an RSS feed or email, read the blog, and then leave without visiting other content on your site.

Articles—If you have multi-page articles on your site, you can expect the exit rate on the last page to be higher than the exit rate for other site content.

Informational Pages—Most people research a product or service to some extent before buying. So, a visitor might look at your “About Us” page, your FAQ page, and a couple of product pages, and then exit. That doesn’t mean you failed. It means the visitor found what she was looking for and then left.

When Are High Exit Rates Bad?

High exit rates are cause for concern when they occur on pages within your conversion funnel.

If a visitor reaches your landing page, clicks your call to action, fills out a form, and then leaves before submitting, that’s a problem. It can mean there’s a conversion barrier on that page—something that’s unclear, confusing, or that undermines the visitor’s confidence.

Next Steps

Exit rate can be extremely helpful as you seek to plug up the leaks in your conversion funnel. By knowing which pages have naturally high exit rates and which ones shouldn’t, you can identify conversion problems and boost the overall conversion rate of your website.

Knowing when to expect a high exit rate can help you pinpoint the times when your exit rate shouldn’t be high, which can then help you identify problems that might be causing visitors to leave prematurely.

Got an extraordinarily high exit rate on a specific page? Sign up for our One Free Idea . Put a note in the comments section that your exit rate is high – and we’ll send you our best idea getting people to stay and move forward.